


Nineteen-Hundred Bells

by Schemilix



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar
Genre: Gen, Seeking Mr Eaten's Name
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-05
Updated: 2015-11-05
Packaged: 2018-04-30 05:18:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5151761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schemilix/pseuds/Schemilix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A nameless Seeker drags a comrade along that marsh-mired path, in a honey dream.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nineteen-Hundred Bells

That one will knock at your door, a seven-legged staccato like a frantic beating of wings. White-toothed, his eyes reflect strangely, but he comes to you as a friend with a drop of honey each in a two vials the size of a finger. He sets a bag on your chair without ceremony, and loosens his tie.

  
An old ritual, of sorts. Heaven knows what it’s made from, but the colour is gold and not red – and nobody said a thing about the red kind, which is telling enough.   
He asks after your health (inevitably failing), your affairs (fabrics – yes, wonderful – love – fortunately nothing of the sort, not presently), and if, perhaps, you might have anything in the way of a brisk lunch. The clock is reading three in the afternoon but, perhaps, your visitor forgot before. 

  
You make a foray to the kitchen while your visitor, conspirator, goes about putting out wine, the chairs, and a large, black, fat, ugly-looking candle (though no candle was any more worthy than another, in truth), which greets you as you step into the half-empty parlour with a pair of china plates.

  
“I cooked bacon before I recalled that you haven’t the taste for it. I might have some -”

  
He cuts you off, taking a plate from your unresisting hand. “That will do, that will do.”

  
With one bony hand he fossicks through his pockets for a match, and with the other holds half the sandwich. The wick finally takes, with alarming voracity. He jumps back with the sandwich gripped in his mouth like a child.

  
It doesn’t take more than a moment for you to say, “Heavens, would you put that out? It’s frightfully rancid.”

  
“Whatever – might you mean?” He speaks between bites.

  
You wave a hand in the air vaguely. “The smell! Light another or a gas-lamp or, well, I suppose we’re going to sleep of a sort so you could well leave us in the gloom.”  
“Hm, well, well… it’s quite alright to me, quite alright. You may just be sensitive.” 

  
And then he goes so far as to fend you off from snuffing the beastly thing yourself, before placing his hands on your shoulders and guiding you to one of the divans. He plants one of the vials in your hand firmly.

  
“No, no, none of that,” he says, absently, and flicks the latch off his own vial with a thumb. He sinks into the chair opposite even as he tips the drop onto his tongue. Your own is sickly-sweet, silky, and your lids grow heavy…

 

 

_The wayfare you walk in your dreams is familiar. These are the gardens past the gate to a shallow sleep – but your companion is nowhere to be found. Often you walk, a hand’s width apart as friends do, through this alley of verdant roses and linen and latticework._

_  
This evening (morning, yesterday, tomorrow) you are alone. But not lonely, not honey-veined, you are not. Were never lonely._

_  
Perhaps if you were to look to the sky you would see a veil of petals, a sheening carpet of scales. Instead the night is one long veil, pierced through, spangled with dozens and dozens of glinting shards. A cold wind will pierce the sleep-haze of warmth, chill you, whisper softly – north -_

_  
He puts a hand on your shoulder with a grip frigid as ice. In shirtsleeves, with his cuffs undone and rolled to the elbow. His left arm is bandaged, bloody, still seeping through as if a wound there doesn’t care to close._

_  
You can’t look at his face, and the tallow-burning scent of that bedevilled candle reaches you even here. Grease and soot and smoke and he is undoing the bandages, a streak of blood (by god!), pale skin diseased with the leaking, seeping clots of which there are, felt like an itch, precisely seven on your own sweet skin._

_  
The mark on his arm drinks the blood in, greedily, gracelessly like a child pouring too fast for a small mouth. But the shape it forms evades you, and the roses have wilted and shuddered off their vines like scabs. They form words or burn,_

_NORTH_  
and  
HUNGER  
and  
I AM TO BE SEEKING

_  
The light on the edge of sleep. It was – your visitor’s – or will be perhaps, or has become. The congealing wax is forming, probably, the shape of a haggard and screaming face._

_  
Of course it would be you (that is, he), you (he, an ambery glinting he far from memory) and your numbers and your speaking-shapes and your words-that-burn, you and your endless damned curiosity and he is gone again,walking, only you will follow._

_  
Explain yourself. Put the damn thing out. I don’t want to know._

_  
A valley of knives. Six pathways. A mire strewn with reeds that flinch away with ugly faces. A sky, filled with cold light, that spins above and peers down with thankless constellations, alien to you. You might trail him for a minute or may have traipsed through a lifetime of grotesque wonders._

_  
Hysteria means you are alive. A cognitive pain means you are alive. All of this, this! This meaningless promenade of monstrosities, it proves nothing. But still you walk, his back feet in front of you, his fingers dripping slowly with the blood from his mutilated arm. It is as though the environment slides past you both, like the heavens might have rotated about the pit of the Earth._

_  
When he stops, he falls, string-cut and boneless and papery, bent over – and – there is blood on his back, much of it, how much can one man bleed before the boatman calls him and – piercing through the fabric of his waistcoat those are claws, streaked with fluid and fat, and you thought you saw inside the wound of his arm coarse fur like the legends of the werewolves… a skin in a skin; they are wings, a bat’s wings, opening against a distant and uncaring sky._

_  
Will he fly, or be shed like a chrysalis? Your eyes are closing, and so they are opening…_

 

 

The candle has burned to a lump on the parlour table. When your eyes open, it is to an empty chair. On the table, a stack of papers, there pinned by a knife, the kind sharpened for killing, though your visitor, surely, had never been a killer. Thinking of the sandwich abandoned on the table, you reach for the relic.

  
The topmost note is scrawled, with his characteristic crossing and uncrossing and backtracking of words:  _i can only apologise – you – for me to know you must learn to know. To learn. I could never teach a stranger. That would never be enough. my friend I am sorry_

  
And there, the habitual signing of his name. You take a croissant from the kitchen. No, two – heavens, it isn’t enough. Somewhere in the midst of that dream was an address, a note, a name, that led North, North past the barriers of stone and salt, up through the caverns of basalt and skull to a secret in the crucible of the sky. 

 

 

 Stars, saints, false-saints, and such nonsense, on and on with it. Rendering processes for tallow. And meat, pages and pages of anatomical diagrams, rendered as rigidly, as obsessively as once he had composed his architectures. Fermentation processes for - of all things! - corn beer, defaced with what may, in fact, be corn beer.

  
You must find it – again, for there it was, but lost, and place it upon you, upon your flesh, that is the purpose and you, eating another pastry, sift through the notes even as nausea begins to crawl at you. Each sheet has no more than six. No more than six…

**Author's Note:**

> The characters in question here are loosely Royce Bracket and Maximillias Darzi, for the curious.


End file.
